*
‘The first impression of the New Zealanders was interesting. Their whole costume is black. Black jersey with a silver fern leaf, black knickers, black stockings and boots. One funny item was that the whole team came out in pink elastic knee bandages and anklets which had a very peculiar effect ….’
‘Their skins are of an equable brownish olive tint ….’
‘Their kit is, to begin with, jet black, and that must strike their opponents rather forcibly at the outset. Then each jersey has a sort of deeper yoke of a different material, the yoke of the jersey worn by the three-quarters the five-eighths, and halfback, is made of silk, and is therefore slippery to touch as is compatible with safety ….’
‘They work together like the parts of a well-constructed watch. Wherever a man is wanted, there he is!’
‘They had the true athlete’s walk, shoulders above the hips ….’
‘There is a note of what might be called desperation—or, better still, desperateness in the play of the New Zealanders …. Somebody said of Lord Beaconsfield as a debater, “He talks like a horse racing—he talks all over.” That is how the New Zealanders play, as if their hope of eternal welfare depends upon success. Every nerve and sinew braced all but to snapping point.’
‘There is a complete absence of all that noise with which habitués of London Football grounds are only too well acquainted.’
‘Our side were like a lot of cowboys, compared to them.’ Mr Carter, ex-President of the Devon Rugby Football Club.
‘One could not help being struck with the magnificent physique of the team, Cunningham, the forward known as the “lock” or centre scrummager of the second rank, being especially a splendid example of humanity.’
*
We began to feel better about ourselves.
(2003)
Emily Perkins, from Novel About My Wife
Ann lay downstairs on the sofa, her long legs over the end, her eyes closed, an effigy from a fairy tale. I poured a beer and sat and watched her, the faint purply lines on her eyelids, the smudged eyeliner, the saliva glistening in the corner of her slightly open mouth. She’d been off sex since she got pregnant. I didn’t know whether or not this was normal and couldn’t think of anyone to ask. The one time we tried it she said she didn’t like the alcohol on my breath. She was dry. We persevered but it didn’t seem worth going through again. I was hoping for a second trimester transformation.
She woke suddenly, with a deep intake of breath. I put down my drink. Her head jerked towards me and she clutched a pillow to her at the same time. For some reason neither of us spoke. She sat up and flicked her gaze around the room, her head darting like a bird’s, as though sure somebody else was there.
‘What?’ I said, and coughed to clear my throat. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing.’ She stood, then sat down again. ‘I thought there was someone in the room.’
‘Only me.’
Ann told me her dream. It is not my usual practice to listen to other people’s dreams. I can’t bear the female penchant for analysing these sleep-time ramblings as though they contain messages of meaning. Horoscope bullshit, palm reader lies. This time I paid attention. She was still in the dream’s grip, speaking almost in a monotone, holding my arm as though afraid.
When she first woke her voice often sounded more Australian than usual. Ann assimilated successfully when she came to this country over twenty years ago. It was a survival move, she told me, defence against being treated like a colonial bozo by arrogant parochial shit-heads like me. Shit-head, wanker, prick (prek, she said it)—these endearments were common to her, she swore like a posh girl. I have met self-appointed upper-class Australians, with their landed gentry airs and Aryan physiques; they wear linen in varying degrees of beige, their shirt collars up, have suntans and streaked blond hair and speak with pretentious rounded twangs, shushing ‘s’s. They maintain the same old right school, right surname nonsense essential to any strain of society that considers itself superior. In their case it is an especial curse, coming as most of them do from looters, killers and thieves, and that’s just what they did once they got there, never mind what got them sent in the first place. Ann wasn’t one of those.
Some facts are known. She was born in Australia in the mid-1960s. At the point in time that I’m describing, this was all I knew about her life before she landed on these shores, aged seventeen, full of fury and adventure, in the heyday of New Romanticism. Like everyone of her generation she was enraged with the world as it was. She enjoyed the anger; it powered her forwards through her reinvention. Scrupulously she avoided other Australians, the squatted flats of Earl’s Court, the lair-ups and random homesick sex. She was no longer ‘En Weals’ but Ann Wells, who with her drawled vowels and fishnet gloves, tilted chin and smoky eyes, defied anyone who challenged her right to be here.
I was at university at this time, getting sat on by fat lesbians who were in love with Hélène Cixous but couldn’t find anyone to fuck them. If Ann and I had met then, we speculated later, we would probably have gone to bed together and then behaved inhumanly towards each other as quickly as possible. It was my emaciated phase, when cheekbones were at a higher social premium than having a friend who knew Simple Minds (I could tick this box too), and perfecting your angst-ridden bastard routine was guaranteed to get you laid. This was where the puddle-eyed screwy girls entered my life and where I learned that the tougher they acted, the more you could get away with because they couldn’t be seen to care. When I fell in love with Ann I fell way out of my depth. Too late, I discovered that in her the toughness was all true and all a lie, both at the same time.
It is surprisingly, disappointingly hard for me not to ramble on about myself, when my (self-assigned; perhaps this is the problem) task is to figure out how Ann got us both here. I’d have thought years of reading other people’s thinly veiled autobiography in screenplay form for a hundred-odd quid a pop would have put me off the personal. The wandering down lonely streets, the unattainable beauty, the mother fixation and, worst of all, the obligatory masturbation scene. So often have I had to put down my tea in disgust at other people’s compulsion to tell the world their dirty little secrets. But here I am just like everybody else, wanting all the detail, picking over the laundry, not content with what is in front of me now, sniffing hard with my face right up against the past.
Ann became a waitress in one of the champagne-spilling, Camembert-frying restaurants of the day. Before long she was managing the place, greeting people at the door with the unsmiling facial rigor mortis that we all suffered from back then. She was, briefly, at the centre of things, where all the right music was played and drugs were taken and styles were worn; she was someone you had to know. The lifestyle, playing at dressing up, suited her. It was as far from Pokesville Australia as she could imagine. By the time the summer of love hit, she like everyone was bored with looking bored and she leapt on the new drugs, the ones that made her look happy. There were always boyfriends, often older, attached, but nothing serious, and then one day she realised that she wanted to go to Paris but that her UK visa had expired, and so she got married. In the Marylebone Registry Office, upstairs amongst the faux marble columns and oak-panelled walls, at eleven o’clock in the morning she became Mrs Lincoln. It surprised me, this, that she would change her name. Some facts are known.
Ann didn’t live with her husband. She never had sex with him. The deal was that he and his boyfriend could set up in Australia in a couple of years’ time, and she’d go out and act as his wife until the authorities put the right stamp in his passport. Knowing now what I do about Ann’s attitude to her country of birth, I wonder if she ever really planned to follow through, or if the crossed fingers she held behind her back during the ceremony were more about the emigration promise than the wedding vows.
Tonia told me about the crossed fingers. She had met Ann when both were working as artists’ models at a Slade life drawing class. In my limited experience, a certain type
of woman becomes a life model. She has a history with class-A drugs and finds it hard to understand why the students don’t lovingly render her tattoos. Ann and Tonia were still young; they had serious nightlife habits to support; Tonia supplied the drugs and Ann had the scars. Over the weeks, in the five-minute interval between classes, as one dressed and the other stripped (look I know it’s not supposed to be sexual, but it just is), they exchanged first covert glances, then nods, then began to speak. They must have been gorgeous then, rake-thin laughing girls, Ann with that tumble of hair and the faint slice marks on her long blue-white thighs, Tonia’s dark brown limbs arranged at angles over the white-sheeted podium, shadows in the cleft of her collarbone as she leaned forwards …. Oh, it’s so wrong to think about your wife’s best friend in this way, but as the young say nowadays, it’s so right …. Tonia lived near the campus, in a filthy enormous Peckham squat with an indefinite number of people: before too long Ann started sleeping with one of them, Useless Bill, who pretended to be a film-maker but was more a professional ashtray; he smoked roll-ups incessantly and rubbed the leavings on his rank-smelling grey jeans. I like to think the sheer pointlessness of Useless Bill’s existence was the catalyst for Ann’s next move, which was to surprise herself, and everyone she knew, by enrolling in a foundation course at Camberwell College of Arts.
Several years later Ann went, reluctantly, to her husband’s funeral. He had never got to Australia: hepatitis caught from needle sharing kept him at home and eventually a fungal infection killed him. He and Ann had lost touch but his partner called and gave her the news. ‘Dress like a widow,’ Sam told her. ‘Martin would like that.’ So when I first laid eyes on Ann her face was obscured under a black net veil, her tall slim figure encased in a 1940s suit, black high heels sinking into the cold graveside mud. Martin was buried in Bournemouth, where he had been living and then half-living, and afterwards we—those who had been his friends, his family—congregated at the draughty beach hut he had shared with Sam, grey winter waves crashing just outside. It was there that Ann took her hat off and I saw all of her red hair, gathered into a heavy pile at the nape of her neck. She was thirty then and at her most striking, her face solemn and white, a properly sombre note against the multi-coloured fairy lights and glowing tulips Sam had draped around the place as decoration.
I was there with Bridget: we no longer lived together but through her I vaguely knew Sam, and paying respects to his dead boyfriend seemed like the right thing to do. But really the wake was intolerable, pervaded as it was with a sullen sort of tragedy despite the Santa’s grotto feel: another good man gone too soon, why Lord why, sort of thing. Martin had belonged to a tight little community of university friends, of whom Bridget was one. Perhaps I envied them their ease with one another, as though they all belonged to the same special race, but since they walked around glum because the race had dwindled, it was not what I would call a fun send-off. Through the fog of cigarette smoke and sea damp I made my way to Sam and asked who was the woman with red hair and he said, ‘Martin’s wife.’ We weren’t introduced but when I overheard her making her excuses, explaining that she had to take the train, I offered her a lift back to London and left Bridget hugging Sam, promising she wouldn’t leave until after the weekend. As I left, my hand hovering near the small of Ann’s back, Bridget gave me the most disgusted of her extensive array of disgusted looks. She knew me.
Who was Ann then? Mostly what I remember is that getting together with her plunged me into a bout of deep insecurity. Who was she? Who cared? Who was I, who dared to think she might want to be with me? Every morning after we slept together I would wake amazed that I’d escaped being transformed into a lion or placed under some other kind of curse. In fact getting her into bed—or across the kitchen table—was the easy part. It was getting into her mind that required a technique I apparently lacked. For the longest time she seemed not to give a shit about me, while I lost every shred of dignity phoning her several times a day, booking tickets to plays that I thought would impress her, cooking extravagant and frankly homosexual fish dinners because she was a part-time vegetarian, and generally haunting her life like a sad old ghost who doesn’t know when to stop.
For a year and a half we took turns visiting each other at night. At that time she had a cheap lease on a place in Clerkenwell, near the hospital where she would later work, just before the area became fashionable. I used to walk down from Camden on sooty summer evenings, find her in her tiny studio flat surrounded by small piles of moulded wax and human hair, slip her sandals on to her long bare feet and gently push her out the door. We’d drink everywhere, in the new gastropubs and the Fleet Street holes and the tapas bars behind Tottenham Court Road, making ourselves wavy, smudged, emerging into tepid air as though into warm water, leaping recklessly on to the number 19 home just as it was pulling away. Ann pulled away, she tried it, she was so totally convincing I was on the verge of giving up, and then—she must have sensed my withdrawal, felt the silence of the phone as the nights went by while I didn’t call her, now a week, now a month—she appeared in the doorway of my flat, ears red, hands thrust into her trench coat pockets, and told me in a quick, angry voice that she loved me. Behind her, across the road, wind shook the tree blossoms. She scowled. Was I so fucking rude that I wasn’t going to invite her in? My mouth filled with a new taste. The beginnings of tears shuddered on her lower lids. Every part of my body was pent with the weeks of restraining myself from contacting Ann but still I drew the moment out, not wanting her to have it so easy. Hate, love.
‘Good,’ I finally said. ‘Because I don’t ever want to go a day without seeing you again.’
(2008)
Kate Duignan, ‘Four Reasons to Come to Scotland’
Arthur’s Seat
Because I’m in love
with the idea
of you and me
walking around Cat Nick
over the Hawse and down
the Gutted Haddie:
how we would loll
in a small hollow
amongst gorse and stinging nettle,
with crows breaking their voices
on the rocks above
and you would say
crikey
and I would say
worth it,
don’t you think?
airpoints
Because some bleak day in winter
when the sea is iron and the faces of men
and women close over like mussel shells
you can fly to Samoa
for nothing, wear pink lavalavas for a week
each day place fresh
bougainvillea in a small glass
jar in your room.
old bones
Because you can go home
to a place you never knew.
Drive one afternoon the long road up to Luss
with the loch on the right
the sunlight cutting in
at the particular angle it always has.
There will be
a post office
a coffee shop
a tall white house on the crest of the hill
but no further information.
Go down to the shore.
If the distant static of the long-since dead
is drowned out by the crash of rain on the lake
run back across black soil
that you want to reach down and bury your hands into.
solstice
If you come
we’ll go
to a movie
an opera
or (if you’re quick)
final match
of the World Cup.
At midnight
walk back
from the pub
or theatre:
astonished at the sky
still fading and fading.
(2008)
Diana Bridge, ‘Diary: September 20–21’
It was the day Wu Mei placed an orchid
in the nec
k of a tall vase scrolled all over with
peony and set it, petal-thin and fragile as
any old culture, against the light.
Five days before, alert to the sound of a bell
humming not so far down in the earth’s crust,
jarring small animals into flight, both dogs
had hunched heads back on shoulders
and—aiming muzzles at the sky above the yard—
howled out their own proleptic poem.
That was the day my daughter left.
We three smothered the omen.
Like a giant shout rebounding off mountains
and the rims of reservoirs, a volume rolling from side
to side of a bowl mouth, the earth lurches.
We are rocked together in the arms of a rapist high
on his own momentum, oblivious to us, the small ones,
who crouch under tables, hug door jambs—
only the children do this naturally—run from
our lives’ detail our into unsafe streets.
The next morning, as I have heard the bible say,
a darkness hung over the earth. Bloated,
yellow-gray. I could not see to read.
There is no going down to the city.
I would like to dig alongside other hands
and with our common hands reach for those
still there in the dirt. For me, the marred
and the mutilated are all imagined.
With the return of light the stories come, collide—
prop each other up. The doctor’s son is saved,
though his army barracks topples on its face.
One of Wu Mei’s sons has lost his restaurant and his home.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 135